YouTube Tests Sleep Timer for Premium Subscribers
If you pay for YouTube, you have another feature that can be added to your Premium benefits : the company is currently testing an in-app sleep timer that can be used to stop playback after a certain amount of time.
If you go to bed in complete silence every night, adding a sleep timer to a service like YouTube may seem strange. You watch YouTube videos while you’re awake, not when you go to bed. But listen: some of us really need something—anything—playing in the background every night to fall asleep, and YouTube is the perfect tool for that. The service offers a virtually unlimited supply of long, monotonous videos that can be played to lull you to sleep. The problem is that some of them are so long that you risk waking up to see the video an hour or two later if it’s still playing.
This is where a sleep timer can come in handy: if you know it takes you about 20 minutes to fall asleep, you can set the sleep timer to 20 minutes (maybe a little longer to be on the safe side): once the timer is up , your playback will stop and you can continue sleeping without interruption.
Using YouTube’s built-in sleep timer
Premium subscribers can try out the feature now by going to YouTube’s Experimental Features page . You can also find it in the YouTube settings on your smartphone under the “Try new experimental features” section. Once enabled, you’ll see a sleep timer in the settings of any video you play. You can set the timer for 10, 15, 20, 30, 45 or 60 minutes or until the video ends.
YouTube says the feature is available until September 2. It’s unclear whether it will disappear completely after this date or whether YouTube will stop testing the feature and make it available to all Premium subscribers by default.
How to Use Sleep Timer Without Paying for YouTube Premium
However, you don’t have to pay for YouTube to use the sleep timer. If you have an iPhone, you have a built-in sleep timer that you can use to play any media. To use it, open the Clock app, then tap the Timers tab. Set the timer for any length of time you want, then tap When Timer Ends . Scroll down and select Stop Playing . Start the timer and then play the YouTube video. Once your timer expires, your iPhone will stop playing and lock itself so you don’t wake up and lose extra battery life.
If you’re using Android, there’s no built-in equivalent. Your best bet is to download a third-party app designed for this task, such as Kuczera’s Sleep Timer . If you have a Samsung device, this Reddit post also discusses a possible automation you can set up to stop playback after a certain period of time:
-
Open modes and procedures.
-
Click Programs in the lower right corner, then select the plus icon in the upper right corner.
-
In the “If” section, select the “Run manually” command.
-
In the “Then” section, add the “Wait before next action” command. Here you can choose how long the timer will run.
-
Back in the Next section, add the Close App command, then select the app you want to close. In this case it’s YouTube.
-
Name the procedure and click Save .
-
Whenever you want to start the timer, click Play .